


And You're the Sky

by GallifreyisBurning



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Bisexual Ginny Weasley, Bisexual Harry Potter, Bisexuality, Coming Out, Dancing, Drinking, Fluff, Friendship, General Shenanigans, Ginny Weasley is a Good Friend, Harry Potter Epilogue What Epilogue | EWE, Home Renovations, M/M, Number Twelve Grimmauld Place, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Post-Hogwarts, Post-War, Queer Themes, like basically everyone, lots of bisexuals
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-23
Updated: 2019-11-01
Packaged: 2020-09-24 21:09:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,340
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20365120
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GallifreyisBurning/pseuds/GallifreyisBurning
Summary: Ginny is bisexual. Harry didn't actually know that was a thing. Suddenly, faced with this new knowledge, Harry has to reframe all of his past interactions... and figure out what they mean for his future.A tale of rebuilding, reevaluating, regrets, and revelations. Featuring magical fake IDs, therapeutic wallpaper ripping, and learning how to live when you didn't think you'd survive.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hey all! So this is my first Drarry - and, indeed, my first HP fandom - effort ever. I've been reading a lot of amazing coming out and self-acceptance fics about these two, and wanted to explore my own coming out narrative through these characters that I love so much. I've got ideas for where this is going, but I'm hoping a little feedback will get the muses working! I have a tendency to publish short chapters as soon as I'm done with them so that I can't second guess myself, so apologies for the small first installment. 
> 
> Title from "Cecilia and the Satellite," by Andrew McMahon in the Wilderness

Harry and Ginny sat at the edge of the lake, sweaty and overheated, trousers rolled up to mid-calf, leaning back on their hands with their bare feet dangling into the cool water. The sun beat down, making everything smell like hot clover and grass, and the air was humid and heavy, the floating pollen visible in the golden light. They were taking a much needed break from the Hogwarts rebuilding efforts—something that, without much discussion, had become a joint summer project for many of those who had participated in the Battle of Hogwarts and come (more or less intact) out the other side. The work was physically and magically demanding, and seemed to fulfill a deep-seated need in the battle’s survivors to both tangibly repair the damage done to their world and to exhaust themselves to the point of suppressing the nightmares that plagued so many of them in the aftermath. 

“I suppose it’s time we talk about it, isn’t it?” Ginny asked, breaking the companionable silence that had lingered between the pair. She was gazing out over the water, her long red hair pulled up messily off her neck in an attempt to invite a nonexistent breeze. Harry sighed and laid back, crossing his arms behind his head and closing his eyes beneath his round-framed spectacles against the glare of the summer sun. 

“S’pose so,” he answered, not sounding as though he found the matter terribly urgent. Ginny copied his pose, the bright flame of her hair and her pale, freckled skin vivid against the grass. 

“I don’t think we should get back together,” she said without preface, her tone matter of fact. Harry smiled slightly, unsurprised, his eyes still closed.

“No, I don’t reckon we should,” he answered.

“Really?” Ginny asked, relief audible in her voice, turning her head toward him. Harry rolled onto his side to face her, opening his eyes to meet her hopeful gaze and propping his head on his fist.

“Really,” he affirmed. 

“Oh thank goodness,” Ginny replied, her smile almost hiding the shadow of mourning and loss behind her eyes. Said eyes went wide when Harry raised an eyebrow at her exclamation. “Not like that!” she rushed to say, “I just meant… You know what I mean! I still care about you so much but… I don’t think either of us are who we were when we were together. It seems a little… I dunno. Now that everything’s over, I think it’s better to just move forward, I guess. You know? Figure out who we’ll be without the war.”

“Yeah,” Harry agreed, flopping back onto his back and allowing his faux indignation to fade away. “You’re still one of my best friends, but I’ve been thinking about it a lot, and I think I need to be on my own for a bit, sort myself out.” He took a moment, trying to put his thoughts into words. “Honestly, I don’t really know what I want to do now. Like, AT ALL. Other than not fight anymore. I feel like… I’ve spent the past seven years with Voldemort hanging over my head, yeah? And now I don’t even know who I am without that.” 

Ginny smiled softly at him, understanding and sadness visible in her gaze. “You’re Harry,” she replied simply. “Just Harry.”

“Just Harry,” he agreed, a grin just beginning to tease at the corners of his mouth. “I like that. I feel like I haven’t been Just Harry in ages.” The water lapped at their toes, and the sun beat down on their upturned faces. For this one moment, Just Ginny and Just Harry lay in companionable silence and enjoyed the fact that they had survived.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~ ~*~ ~*~

As the summer went on, Harry and Ginny spent more time together than they ever had when they had been a couple. Harry had moved into 12 Grimmauld Place, not really knowing where else to go now that he wasn’t stuck at the Dursley’s, and Ginny had started showing up regularly shortly thereafter. She was ostensibly there to help him clean the place up, but in reality, they both knew that she was fleeing the oppressive air of mourning that had overtaken the Burrow in the wake of Fred’s death. They had only addressed it once, before letting the topic drop.

“It’s not what he would have wanted,” Ginny had stated plainly over a half-drained bottle of beer, “and I can’t stand it. I don’t want to associate him with that. I want to remember him like he was.” Harry had nodded in understanding, and that had been that.

When they weren’t rebuilding the school, therefore, they were continuing the work that had begun when the house was the headquarters of the Order of the Phoenix — ripping down fusty velvet curtains and trashing cursed relics; rolling up dark, heavy carpets and stripping ornate wallpaper stained by the frames of the long-discarded collection of house elf heads. Harry took a vindictive pleasure in destroying the remnants on the house that had so haunted Sirius and making it over anew. They refinished the wood floors of the ground level with a clear lacquer, leaving them a glowing, pale gold, and painted the walls bright white. When the portrait of Walburga Black in the front hall screamed at them for desecrating her ancient and noble house, Ginny very matter-of-factly stated that she would paint right over her face if she didn’t shut up, which turned out to be a much more effective deterrent than the heavy curtains had been. Walburga glared and flounced out of the portrait, and aside from the occasional grumble from the empty frame, they heard very little from her after that. 

The heavy furniture and un-cursed but still overly ornate heirlooms were piled unceremoniously in the back garden to be vanished or donated to families who had lost their homes during the war. Harry offered to let Andromeda take anything she liked, but she had assured him that she wanted nothing to do with the house of the family that has disowned her. On an odd whim, he had also sent an owl to Narcissa Malfoy. She was, after all, also a Black, and she had saved his life, even if it was for largely selfish purposes. He received a curt but polite owl back shortly after sending his note over, thanking him but declining. The fate of the Malfoy family was still uncertain as the Death Eater trials moved forward (Harry had provided testimony for the Ministry’s evidence cache of Draco and Narcissa’s key moments of treachery to Voldemort’s side that had been so critical to the winning of the war, feeling obligated to ensure that their actions were separated and distinguished from those of the Malfoy patriarch — Lucius could rot in Azkaban, for all Harry cared, but something about the idea of the other two ending up there made him a bit queasy) and Harry supposed that accruing more heirlooms from a notoriously dark wizarding family wouldn’t be in their best interest. Still, he was glad that he had offered. 

Ron and Hermione had gone to Australia together to try to restore the Grangers’ memories, which meant that outside of the Hogwarts restoration, Harry hadn’t had much company besides Ginny. From time to time, Neville or Luna would come by Grimmauld Place to help out or just keep company with Harry and Ginny, but it was largely just the two of them, or Harry on his own. When Neville came by, he helped begin overhauling the back garden, assisting Harry in picking easy to care for plants that wouldn’t require him to spend hours tending the lawn like he had back on Privet Drive. Luna was more likely to flutter around the house making small decorative additions — adding lopsided vases full of dried flowers and odd, pinwheel-like contraptions, or painting swirling patterns over window frames. Harry grinned every time he came across one of her whimsical contributions. He couldn’t really explain why, but they made the place feel more like a home. Sometimes, he caught Ginny watching Luna with a fond and somewhat speculative look on her face, and sometimes he saw them chatting together, heads bowed close, smiles bright. He didn’t think too much about it, however, until one day while he and Ginny were scrubbing down the outsides of the windows with a mix of muggle elbow grease and extra strength scouring charms, she suddenly made an announcement to him.

It was another uncharacteristically hot day, and Ginny was sporting shorts and a sleeveless tee, while Harry had settled for a cut off pair of Dudley’s old jeans and a worn out tee shirt that he’d owned since fourth year. The pair were using rough sponges to scrub away some of the more stubborn grime that their magic couldn’t seem to completely erase.

“So, I think I might be in love with Luna?” Ginny dropped in an overly casual tone, wiping sweat from her forehead. Harry paused in his work, studying the unidentifiable smudge on glass that he’d been working on fruitlessly for the past few minutes.

“Oh, yeah?” he asked, keeping his voice as unconcerned as possible while piecing together his recent observations with this new and surprising confession.

“Yeah, I reckon so. Is that weird?”

Harry thought about it for a moment and then shrugged. “Not really,” he answered honestly. “We already said we weren’t getting back together, and you’re one of my best friends. I want you to be happy. Whether that’s with a bloke or a girl or no one at all doesn’t have much to do with me, does it?”

Ginny laughed, sounding relieved. “I guess not,” she agreed. They went back to cleaning, the buzz of summer insects humming in the heavy air; the heat and humidity raising beads of sweat that prickled at their exposed necks. Harry finally managed to remove the last of the smudge and casting a final spray of soapy water from his wand over the entire window.

“I can’t say I’m not a little surprised, though,” Harry admitted, eyes still on the window, washing the last streaks of soap off of with a strong  _ aguamenti _ , after a few minutes of companionable silence had passed.

“Really?” Ginny asked cautiously, “Why’s that?”

“Well,” Harry answered awkwardly, hesitating, “I just, I wouldn’t have guessed that you were gay. I thought we were pretty good together, honestly.” Harry knew he didn’t want to get back together with Ginny. He was truly enjoying spending time with her as a platonic friend. But still, the idea that their time as a couple hadn’t meant anything to her hurt. She was the first person he’d had a real romantic connection with (he did not count his brief and disastrous relationship with Cho Chang), and the thought that it was one sided stung, especially considering the distinct lack of love in his life growing up.

Ginny’s arm dropped to her side, and she turned sharply toward Harry, giving him an exasperated look. “Harry,” she said, staring at him until he looked over at her, rubbing the back of his neck sheepishly, “We WERE good together! I’m not gay, I’m bisexual!”

“You’re…” Harry asked, blinking at her in confusion.

“Bisexual? I like both?” Harry’s eyebrows drew together, his face still puzzled.

“That… that’s a thing?”

Ginny rolled her eyes. “Of COURSE it’s a thing. What, you thought everyone was just either gay or straight?”

Harry flushed. “I mean… yeah?”

“Did you come of age under a rock?!”

Harry glared a bit. “In a cupboard, mostly, actually.” He was embarrassed, but also annoyed. He hated being treated like he should know things when no one had ever taught him. Between his messed up home life, being mostly ignored at school before Hogwarts because the Dursleys told his teachers he was a problem child, and Hogwarts focusing only on magical education with no attention paid to anything resembling life skills, it wasn’t like he’d had a lot of help figuring the world out.

Ginny’s eyes widened and she shot him an apologetic look. “I’m sorry,” she said earnestly, “I forget sometimes. I guess the Dursley’s didn’t talk much about that kind of thing with you, did they?”

Harry snorted. “Unless you count Uncle Vernon yelling at the telly about how all the ‘poofters’ ought to be hauled off to jail, not so much, no.” Truth be told, he had only the most passing knowledge about homosexuality. He had no problem with it — anything the Dursley’s hated he figured was probably alright, and anyway, he’d known gay people here or there: Seamus, for one, and there were compelling rumors about Dumbledore and his relationship with Gellert Grindelwald, and neither of those things bothered him at all. Still, he wasn’t exactly well versed in any of it. He supposed the idea that if someone could be attracted to either gender then they could be attracted to both made sense when he thought about it, it had just… never come up before.

Ginny rested her hand on his shoulder briefly, and he raised his to meet it, giving it a quick and reassuring squeeze before getting back to work, wafting a soft drying charm over the now-spotless window. Harry let his mind roll this new information around as he labored.  _ Bisexual. _ Huh. He thought back on past conversations with Ginny, where they’d discussed how fit certain Quidditch players were, focusing on one particular tipsy conversation where Ginny’s insistence that Gwenog Jones was the best looking captain in the league had raised fiery objections from Harry, who thought it was obvious that Iskander Kouris took the title. He’d just assumed that everyone had an appreciation of attractive people of any gender. But now that he knew that Ginny was actually ATTRACTED to women, pieces began to move around inside his mind, clicking together in new and unnerving patterns.

Later that night, after Ginny had retired to the room that she occasionally “crashed” in (but which, in reality, she had more-or-less moved into and occupied at least three or four nights a week), Harry laid on top of the soft white cotton sheets of his own bed, in the room that had once belonged to Sirius, and stared at the ceiling, his mind still whirring with new information and insight. He thought over his friendships with various boys over the years; the fascinations that he’d never quite had a word for. The buzz of anticipation that had tinged his interactions with his earliest friend, a boy called Simon, before Dudley and his gang has scared him off of hanging around with Harry. The way he had assessed Oliver Wood’s lithe form as he navigated the air on his broom, his hair flying back off his face as his cheeks pinked in the cold wind. The confusing, gut wrenching sensation when Cho had told him that she was going to the Yule Ball with Cedric — how it had stung more, somehow, than if she had named a different boy, as though his jealousy hadn’t only focused on her interest in someone else. The way he had noted the beautiful, haughty lines of Blaise Zabini’s face during the first meeting of the Slug Club.

The way that, for seven years, he had watched Malfoy, always aware of where he was; what he was doing; what he was wearing; the shine of his white-gold hair and the curve of his sneering lip. The way that they would constantly make eye contact across the crowded Great Hall during meals, glaring or taunting each other but always, always seeking out each other’s gaze. The obsessive way Harry had followed Malfoy sixth year; the way he had tracked his name around the Marauder’s Map; the strange spark of HOPE he had felt when face-to-face with his supposed rival in Malfoy Manor during the war. 

Harry’s breath stopped in shock before he brought his hands up to rub them over his face, shuddering slightly as all of the pieces finally fell, inexorably, into place.

“Christ,” he hissed to himself. Then, a moment later, “Well, fuck.”


	2. Chapter 2

The next week, Ginny convinced Bill to come by Grimmauld Place for a couple days to assess a few things in the house — an oddly menacing window sash; a kitchen cupboard that wouldn’t open even with heavy duty spells being cast at it; a set of built in shelves that fizzled with an almost kinetic energy when they tried to remove the books from them — that merited an experienced curse breaker’s evaluation rather the enthusiastic guesswork of two teens who were not yet technically fully qualified magic users. Bill and Fleur had taken a belated honeymoon shortly after the end of the war and the subsequent spate of funerals, stating a need for some time to themselves to celebrate after the untimely and, frankly, terrifying wrap of their wedding reception. They’d returned a few weeks ago and Bill had returned to his job at Gringotts, but as the bank was still repairing the damage done by the Golden Trio and their little jaunt with a conveniently located Ukrainian Ironbelly, he wasn’t working full hours and was more than happy to lend a hand.

When Harry opened the door to Bill, he was greeted with an enthusiastic smile and handshake before the man entered and enveloped his sister, who was dressed in jeans and a paint splattered quidditch tee, in his arms. “Hey Harry. Good to see you, Gin,” he said warmly as he released her. “Now, what did you two want me to look at?”

Ginny chattered as she led Bill up the stairs to the worrisome window on the second floor landing, Harry following behind. He found himself assessing the older man, taking in the way his red ponytail (which had narrowly escaped Mrs. Weasley’s wrath in the lead up to his wedding) was similar and yet distinctly different to his sister’s as it brushed the muscular dip between his shoulder blades, which shifted under his thin jersey top as he climbed. Harry’s eyes trailed over Bill’s bum and down his long, slimmly muscled legs before sliding back up to his hair and ever-present fang earring. He assessed his own reactions; the way he felt about the way Bill’s body moved under cloth; the hard line of his jaw. It wasn’t an overwhelming sensation, but there was a definite… appreciation. He felt a distinct warmth in his chest at the memory of Bill’s dazzling grin at the door; it wasn’t the intense butterflies and lack of ability to form coherent thoughts that Harry associated with his few early crushes on girls, but it was certainly a different reaction than he felt when he was smiled at by, say, Ron. Harry filed that information away for himself to ponder more later, then shook his head to clear it and continued up the stairs to assist in fixing whatever might be wrong with the problem sash. 

~*~ ~*~ ~*~ ~*~ ~*~

After spending the afternoon and most of the next day breaking the few small curses they’d detected lingering in Grimmauld Place’s architecture (as well as one rather disturbingly aggressive one on a trunk in the attic that they hadn’t sensed but that Bill, luckily, had before it got the chance to remove anyone’s skin as it seemed to have been intended to), Bill had taken a trip to the Burrow to visit his parents, and Ginny had decided to join him, having realized she hadn’t been home in almost a week. She’d returned two days later, unable to bear the oppressive sorrow of her family home for longer than that, bringing more of her belongings along with her. Harry thought more of her things probably lived at his place now than at the Burrow, but he chose not to mention this to his friend. Since their breakup, he’d reached a level of comfort with her that he’d never had before, when he’d felt like there were expectations to be fulfilled, and now he preferred her to spend as much time at Number Twelve as possible. Although he couldn’t yet see himself being comfortable surrounded with people like he would be if he ventured out into the greater wizarding world, he didn’t like being in the big old townhouse alone. Even with all the renovations they’d done, it was still a bit creepy when it was empty. Harry hadn’t recalled Kreacher from Hogwarts after the battle, instead encouraging him to stay and help with the rebuilding, which meant that when Ginny was elsewhere it was well and truly just him rattling around the twisting halls and cavernous rooms. He also genuinely enjoyed her company; he didn’t share the kind of codependent relationship with her that he did with Hermione and Ron, but in some ways that was better — she didn’t pry like they did when he felt weighed down by the losses of the war or needed to sort through his feelings on things, instead peacefully coexisting and providing the comfort of companionship, light banter, and distraction when needed without demanding anything of him.

It was a few days after her return that he decided to broach the subject of his musings on his sexual identity with her.

“So, Ginny,” he asked her in what he hoped was a casual tone as they sat cross legged, side by side on the hard living room floor, flipping through muggle furniture catalogs. Harry had gotten a bit overenthusiastic in his purging of uncomfortable old furnishings, and it was only after the entire ground floor had been emptied other than the long wooden table in the kitchen that he realized he’d left them with nothing to use while he decided what he’d like to have instead. 

“Yes?” she answered distractedly, pulling a pencil from behind her ear to circle the image of a squashy, comfortable looking cream colored sofa. 

“How did you know for sure that you were bisexual?”

Ginny pondered for a moment. “I don’t know, I just sort of always knew, I think. I never really thought about it much. I don’t even remember when I learned the word for it.” She looked up at him, raising an eyebrow. “Why do you ask?”

Harry tried to look unflustered, despite feeling a blush rising on his cheeks. “No reason, just curious,” he asserted, his voice not coming out as casually as he’d hoped it would. Ginny narrowed her eyes at him for a moment before widening them comically.

“Harry do you think you’re… oh my god. Oh, I FUCKING KNEW IT! Hah!” She let out a delighted laugh. “You’re totally bi, aren’t you??”

“What? No! That’s not—” Harry attempted to deny, but Ginny cut him off.

“It so is! I’m not judging, I swear. Obviously,” Ginny asserted, trying to reassure him while simultaneously grinning at her conclusion.

“It’s not that, it’s just…” Harry tried. “I don’t know, this is weird! I might be? I never thought about it before you told me about you, and now I can’t STOP thinking about it. I didn’t even know I COULD like both, and I like girls, so I just never...” Harry trailed off with a groan, hiding his face in his hands and leaning forward to rest his elbows on his knees.

“Harry, it’s fine, it’s no big deal!” Ginny told him on a smile, leaning forward and resting her hand on his shoulder comfortingly. “I shouldn’t have laughed, it’s just, I sort of suspected and I REALLY like being right.”

Harry dragged his hands off his face to glare at the redhead, who was still struggling to hide a grin. “What do you mean, you suspected?” he queried with a disgruntled frown, “That’s bullshit, you can’t have known something about me that I didn’t know about myself. And anyway, I’m not even sure!”

Ginny smiled at him pityingly. “You’ve never been the quickest on the uptake when it came to how you feel, Harry.” When he opened his mouth to protest, she held up a hand to quiet him. “I’m sorry, but it’s true! You have really visceral gut reactions to things, but you’re not great at thinking through what might be behind them.” Her smile morphed into a mischievous grin. “Also, I caught you staring at Bill’s arse when he was up on the stepladder working on that cursed cupboard.”

“I was not!” Harry tried, now blushing furiously.

“Oh you SO were,” Ginny snickered. “But even before that, I thought you might be.”

“How come?” Harry asked as he stretched his legs out in front of himself and rested his weight back on his hands, honestly curious at what might have given him away to a friend while failing to clue him in himself.

Ginny hesitated. “...Don’t be mad,” she hedged, her eyes still sparkling but also showing a hint of nervousness.

“Oh god, what.” Harry’s voice was full of dread.

“The whole Malfoy thing?” Ginny confessed, voice turning up at the end in a slight question, trying to hold his gaze. However, as the name left her lips, he scrunched his eyes shut in embarrassment. He should have known that if that particular relationship had raised flags for him, more observant people would definitely have noticed.

“Oh god,” he repeated on a pained groan, flopping onto his back. “It’s so obvious, isn’t it?”

Ginny snickered. “It really, really is.”

“Fuck,” Harry groaned again, rubbing his closed eyes under his glasses. “I don’t even LIKE the stupid git!”

“Of course you don’t,” Ginny responded dismissively. “He’s a total prat, as well as a massive coward. Doesn’t mean he’s not pretty, though, and you two have always had chemistry, even if it tended to come out in fairly nasty ways.”

“I don’t know if he’s COMPLETELY a coward,” Harry mumbled, trying to justify himself. “He did cover for me at Malfoy Manor. And he didn’t kill Dumbledore, even though he knew he was risking his family.” He sighed. “I’m not saying he’s a hero or anything but… I dunno. I still don’t like him, but maybe he’s not...evil.”

Ginny shrugged. “Maybe not evil,” she conceded, “but still a coward. I don’t know that not  _ actively _ doing something horrible can be construed as brave.” She nudged one of his feet with her own. “He’s still an arse, though.”

“Absolutely,” Harry concurred.

“I notice you didn’t deny that he’s pretty,” Ginny smirked. 

“Fuck off, Ginny,” Harry rolled his eyes, but he sat back up, returning to his catalogues.

“So… bi, then?” she asked him after a few moments filled only with the quiet rustling of flipped pages.

“Reckon so, yeah,” he answered. 

She nudged a knee against his. “Welcome to the club.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Massively delayed chapter 2, because work has been nuts and when I have to write professional stuff all day, I don't want to write anything at all in the evenings. Hope you enjoy! Comments and kudos keep me motivated!
> 
> Also, please let me know if you notice typos or inconsistencies; I don't have a beta reader so I rely on my own attention to detail, which can lapse after reading my own chapter five times over!


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another long break! This time it was because I'm working on a collaborative piece with someone else, though, and that's been taking up the majority of my writing time. It should be worth it when that story is done!
> 
> The lyrics in this chapter are from Hanson's "Where's the Love," which was a ubiquitous radio bop in the late 90s. 
> 
> I've also gone back and edited the first two chapters a bit, but nothing substantive has changed, just some stylistic things. Hope you enjoy!

Two nights later, Harry found himself sipping his third beer, smiling to himself as he watched Ginny, Luna, and Neville bounce around the small dance floor in a dark bar full of loud music and enthusiastically drunk young people.  _ Magic is great, _ he mused to himself as he enjoyed the sight of his two slightly-less-that-legal-aged friends, who had magicked themselves slightly-less-than-legal fake IDs, dragging poor Neville into a stumbling jig of some sort. 

Ginny had insisted that they go out to celebrate after Harry had come out to her. “Come on!” she had insisted, looking up at him with wide brown puppy dog eyes that she knew he couldn’t say no to, even now, “We deserve some fun!” They had chosen a muggle pub so that Harry wouldn’t have to wear an illusion to go out — he was stubbornly refusing to appear anywhere Wizarding at the moment, hating the need to constantly avoid photographers and eager people who wanted to thank him for ending the war. 

The place they had settled on was ideal: a small local pub near the entrance to the Leaky Cauldron which allowed them the convenience of flooing there and back without having to venture into Diagon Alley properly. It was dark and narrow, with a long bar leading back to a slightly larger back room, home to a beat up old jukebox full of surprisingly modern music, a well-worn and modestly sized dance floor, strings of multicolored fairy lights, and a crowd of people in their late teens and early twenties who didn’t recognize or hassle them, instead welcoming them into the cheerfully manic crush with nothing more than an occasional appreciative glance at one or the other of them. It wasn’t strictly a gay bar, but seemed to be a diverse and accepting place, with a surreptitious rainbow flag behind the register and a “women’s rights are human rights” poster on the mirror behind the liquor display.

Harry’s three friends looked happy and carefree as they danced, and he couldn’t help but think about how they had looked just three months ago at the final battle: Luna even more waifish than usual after her stay in the Malfoy dungeons; Ginny and Neville covered in bruises and cuts from their interactions with the Carrows; Ginny’s face tear streaked in the aftermath of Fred’s death and Neville burned and blistered from his encounter with the Sorting Hat. Now here they were, dressed in Muggle clothes, wands tucked away because there was no fear of attack, eyes bright with laughter and just enough alcohol to free them from inhibitions. Not that Ginny and Luna had much in the way of inhibitions in the first place, but seeing Neville gamely brave the dance floor, good naturedly going along with Luna and Ginny’s increasingly silly dance moves, made Harry’s heart ache with fondness for his friends and gratitude that they were all here together, changed but not broken. 

“Get your arse over here, Harry!” Ginny yelled at the contemplative boy, breaking his reverie. “We came out to dance, not hover!”

“But I’m good at hovering!” Harry called back with a cheeky grin.

“Get. Out. Here!” Ginny insisted, bounding up to Harry and grabbing the hand not cradling his beer and pulling him out to join the others.

Laughing, Harry gave in and let himself be pulled along, the alcohol coursing through his system allowing him not to worry about how he would look. He gave in to the beat of the pop song blaring from the jukebox (“ _ Where’s the love, it’s not enough, it makes the world go round and round yeah,”)  _ and swayed and bounced and laughed with his friends as Luna took his other hand and led them in a silly, twirling dance. They danced until sweat soaked their hair and shirts, until they had yelled themselves raw as they sang along to lyrics they barely knew, until the crowd crushed them and the bass beats deafened them and the air was stifling and Harry was laughing like he’d never laughed before because for the first time in him life he felt free, free, free.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~ ~*~ ~*~

Going out to dance and drink at the grungy little bar, incongruously called Baroque by someone who evidently liked the pun but not the aesthetic, became a weekly (and sometimes more frequent) ritual for the foursome. Sometimes other Hogwarts acquaintances would join them—Dean Thomas came a few times with a Muggle girl he was seeing (she’d had a sister at Hogwarts a few years before them, Dean said, so they didn’t have to worry about covering for their oddities) and the Patil twins stopped in occasionally. Mostly, however, it was just the four of them: dancing like there was no tomorrow purely because they finally knew that there would be, letting the liquor burn down their throats and give the evenings a hazy, dreamlike aura. When the nights wore on and the dance floor became too claustrophobic, they would wander the London streets, buying chips to eat with greasy fingers while perched on stoops still radiating second hand heat from the blazing summer sun, leaning against one another as they let the cool night air clear their heads. 

At the bar, they danced together and with strangers, splitting apart and coming back together. Harry danced with girls and with boys, relishing the freedom to drift and then return. From time to time, when he was just the right level of tipsy, he would find himself kissing someone as they swayed, savoring the strange juxtaposition of intimacy and anonymity and as tongues tangled and hands slid over sweaty skin. The first time he’d let a boy kiss him—a lean young man in tight jeans with sandy curls and pretty eyes—he’d been pleased to find it not that different than kissing girls, other than the slight graze of stubble against his face. Once, he’d kissed Neville, although they’d both laughed it off afterward as strange and not to be repeated. He’d looked on in quiet, intoxicated contentment the first time Luna kissed Ginny on the dance floor, cementing a change in their relationship that changed nothing and everything. They were good together, he thought. Luna’s dreamy sweetness contrasted beautifully with the blazing determination that comprised Ginny. 

When they received the news that Hogwarts would not be reopening for the new school year—something that shouldn’t have been a shock, given how much time they spent there, helping to rebuild, and the state that the castle was still in—they went to Baroque to drink and dance off the uncertainty of the future. There was a reckless energy in the air as they downed shots of tequila in a toast to the unknown, unsure of what they were supposed to do with themselves in this surreal and unexpected limbo where they weren’t adults (despite what they had been through) and couldn’t be children (despite how much they might wish to be). That night, Harry found himself pinned against a wall in a dim corner by a beautiful, tall boy with dark skin and eyes full of challenge whose long-fingered hands slipped under the hem of his shirt while his lips and teeth grazed Harry’s neck. That night was also the night that the Slytherin’s first appeared.

Harry’s head was lolling against the wall, eyes half lidded as he revelled in the feeling of warm lips and tongue tracing his throat when he caught sight of a familiar glint of blond hair across the room. Hazily, he thought he must be mistaken, but the habit of watching for Malfoy was too ingrained in him and he found himself straining to focus his eyes on the trio standing near the opposite corner. Sure enough, the unmistakable white blond locks—worn loose, now, rather than in the slicked back precision of their youth—topped the pale, lanky form of none other than Draco Malfoy, dressed incongruously in slim cut black Muggle trousers and a thin grey jumper. He was leaning close to his companions—Blaise Zabini and Pansy Parkinson, also sporting Muggle fashions, Harry realized on closer inspection—but seemed to sense Harry’s gaze on him, turning to look across the room and right at Harry. Grey eyes went wide with shock and then something that might have been fear, and Draco spun back to his friends and began speaking rapidly, gesturing in a way that clearly indicated that he wanted them to leave. The other two looked over at Harry, who was now all but completely unaware of the man still lavishing attention in his neck, looking intrigued, and then turned back to Draco and held what looked like a heated conversation before moving somewhat reluctantly toward the door. 

Harry briefly considered just letting them leave, but he could still feel the night’s reckless revelry sizzling through him, and so he ducked away from his companion with an apology and made his way through the crowd to intercept his classmates and erstwhile enemies, who, standing there in their Muggle clothes and obvious discomfort, it was hard to see as anything other than lost kids like the rest of them. “Wait,” he said breathlessly, holding up a hand as he reached them, their paths crossing as they reached the bar on the way toward the door. 

Malfoy stopped reluctantly, his body stiff and his face unreadable. “Potter,” he greeted, his voice mostly even, though Harry could sense the slight tremor that underlay the forced impassivity. 

“Harry,” Harry corrected without thinking. When Draco’s eyebrows shot up in surprise, he shook his head. “I’m just Harry here. That’s sort of the point.” 

“...Harry,” Draco tried, grimacing slightly, “We were just on our way out.”

“I know,” Harry said, “I saw.” There was a pause.

“Yes, well,” Draco said, “If you’ll excuse us…”

“Right, no, I just.” Harry shrugged. “You don’t have to, is all.” From behind Draco’s shoulder, Blaise smirked. Harry shook his head, too tipsy to bother trying to figure out what the boy found amusing. “I just mean… we come here so that we can just be us, be free, without the whole of the Wizarding world watching. And if that’s what you’re looking for, too…” he shrugged again. “It’s a good place for it, is all. We won’t bother you if you don’t bother us.”

Draco met Harry’s eyes and held them, his expression impenetrable. “We appreciate that,” he said finally, “but we really must be off.” Harry nodded and stepped back, letting the three pass. Pansy looked back at him over her shoulder consideringly, but soon the trio had moved through the door and out into the night.

Harry felt a pointy chin rest on his shoulder, and heard Ginny’s voice in his ear. “Was that  _ Malfoy? _ With Parkinson and Zabini?” she asked incredulously.

“Yeah,” Harry responded thoughtfully, “Yeah, it was.”

“Weird,” Ginny said, dislodging herself from Harry and shrugging before grabbing his arm and pulling him back toward the others. “If you’re done letting that bloke feel you up, we’re doing shots again.”

Harry grinned, allowing the strange encounter with the Slytherins to drift out of his mind, an odd, quiet anomaly in the middle of a long, raucous evening. “Let’s do it,” he agreed readily, and let himself be pulled back over to Neville and Luna, where a lime wedge and a salt shaker awaited him. 


End file.
